"One of the things that the GNOME design crew have been focusing on recently is creating a new approach to application design for GNOME 3. We want GNOME applications to be thoroughly modern, and we want them to be attractive and a delight to use. That means that we have to do application design differently to how we've done it in the past."

Don't confuse this with current Gnome - the current 3.x series works just fine on a big screen, but this idea of maximising windows by default is just absurd for such systems.

I've not tried G3 on a netbook - where does the wastage come from? The actual shell takes up very little space (just the top panel) - I'm guessing the problem is the excessive amount of padding in the default widget theme?

Can't agree more. Screenwasting seem to be the new thing. I can see the need for large margins and paddings when we have finger input but for mouse?

Here I am with two 24" screens, I can have many many windows open at the same time, and when I read the new Gnome 3 guidelines they talk about preferring maximized windows... Guess I'm old school when I prefer tiling WMs.

The shell should allow users to add/remove/swap applications on the current activity and add/remove/swap activities on the current workspace. There should be an option to swap workspaces on the current viewport, but it might be disabled by default.

The Wayland render target for GTK+ is coming along, and GNOME 3 will probably ship a default Wayland compositor in the near future. This will make it clean and efficient to implement dynamic mapping of client buffers onto the viewport.

When a unique set of applications is first cued to the workspace, the window manager may use account history and/or application heuristics to rank all the possible tile layouts for this number of client windows and to display the initial layout.

The user may trigger an input event to iterate through the ranked layouts, drag windows to swap their layout positions, and drag borders to resize the tiles.

The window manager should support dialog windows with at least one floating layer. It may or may not let users toggle individual windows between the tiling and floating layers.

The shell should be overlaid on top of the application windows, expanding from a screen edge toward fullscreen with scrolling as necessary to fit icons and widgets.